For Consenting Adults Only -- Big Brother, Bug Out

March 2, 1986|By Douglas Pike of the Sentinel Staff

With a blue-ribbon commission gawking at pornography and TV preacher Pat Robertson primping for the presidency, some vile pleasures soon may get harder to get. A right-wing swing would hurt business along the neon-signed, bar- studded streets that offer fetching ladies outside and half-naked dancers inside. So last week I went to Orlando's strip strip -- the Orange Blossom Trail -- for a look at these endangered species.

This soiree didn't have the cultural punch of PBS, yet it did deepen a conviction of mine: Big Brother should keep his nose out of what consenting adults do discreetly.

In prostitution, a trade that has endured through the ages, regulators have just two legitimate roles. First, to keep from shocking tykes and clogging traffic, sure, shoo hookers off the streets. The other night, I saw just four of these highly paid laborers along Orlando's Trail. That figured because the night was cold and authorities had the heat on. But street-sweeping doesn't give lasting relief because supply and demand must meet somewhere.

This raises the second, more important role for government: It should legalize houses of prostitution and require medical checkups to lower the health risks to customers and prostitutes. Today's puny effort to outlaw prostitution increases the chance that players may pay a surcharge on top of the going rate: catching a sexually transmitted disease, perhaps even the killer AIDS. Another health hazard created by keeping the world's oldest profession illegal: violent, parasitic pimps.

Of course, today's televised moralists want the law to go even further in limiting people's pursuit of happiness. Most would like to stifle even the sleazy, teasy dancing indoors. Sure enough, the first club on my nighttime tour did feature weird contortions done to sick music, but that turned out to be a country-Western joint where couples were doing the Texas two-step. Down the street, the entertainment was closer to Bangkok class.

Inside one joint, about 40 gentlemen and one lady were ogling women who took turns doing their own two-step dancing on stage. Step one was to dance clothed for a few minutes; step two, the same thing in a G-string. The lesson of this exercise -- its bottom line, so to speak -- was vivid: Strangers look sexier with clothes on than without.

These shows go on under the constitutional protection of free speech. One performer in particular -- who looked like a siren version of CBS' Maria Shriver -- was giving new meaning to the word ''undulate.'' There also was the dramatic tension as dancers lavished eye contact and body language on the lads most likely to fold a tip into their garters and up the ante later to a $3 personal dance.

Okay, this was not exactly a montage of human dignity, but neither is toiling full time in a typing pool. Though the dancers weren't showing their IDs, they sure didn't look like minors, so Big Brother shouldn't dictate morality to them.

The final touch to moralizing arguments against sex-oriented commerce is that crime -- from muggers to the Mafia -- goes with the territory. But that calls for getting tougher against robbery and racketeering, not flexing laws against what adults choose to do.